1

A Novel Stall-Avoidance-Scheme based Timer and

Window Mechanisms with Fast Retransmission Strategy
for HSDPA systems
†
Li-Chun Wang and Dimanche-Assane Laina
Department of Communication Engineering
National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
lichun@cc.nctu.edu.tw, Tel: +886-3-5712121 ext. 54599

Abstract— The objective of this paper is to propose a Real-Time and Non-Real-Time applications, it is impor-
N ovel Stall Avoidance Scheme in order to solve the tant that certain quality of service (QoS) targets be met.
”stall” or ”gap” problem in the receiving side reordering
Real-time applications specifically require the delivery of
buffer and to make a comparative study between the
information from the source to the destination within a
conventional scheduling policies in HSDPA downlink for
WCDMA systems employing the Maximum Carrier-to- predefined time in order to satisfy the growing aggressive
Interference (MCI), Round Robin (RR), Proportional demand for the wireless packet data services.
Fair (PF), queue-based exponential rule (QER), and the
proposed Stall Avoidance (SA+QER) scheduling. In this
Packet Stall or ”gap” may occur when one or more
paper, we compare through simulations the performance
packets cannot be forwarded up due to missing packet or
of these schedulers based timer and window schemes with
the proposed scheduler in the presence of packets stalls because of a misinterpretation of an NACK-to-ACK or
within the receiver reordering buffer process. Simulations vice versa. A well-known drawback of stalling is that the
show that in terms of received goodput in upper layer overall system throughput may suffer from severe delay.
and the system overall delay, the proposed stall avoidance
Such delay has a direct impact on user’s satisfaction,
scheduler outperforms all the other schedulers. As result,
because it reduces the applications fidelity, which in
the overall system delay is significantly reduced.
turn causes the user’s frustration. This also affects the
perceived quality of the application by compromising the
Index Terms - Scheduling, HSDPA Stall Avoidance,
integrity of the data to be transmitted or by disrupting
WCDMA systems.
the service.

I. I NTRODUCTION In this paper, we present an issue to solve the packet

The next generation of WCDMA wireless multimedia stall or gap problem that occurs in the receiving side
networks will be a mixture of heterogeneous traffic: buffer by employing an N-channel SAW-HARQ.

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1
II. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK 0.9

CDF of overall received goodput in upper layer

0.8

Most of literatures related to the WCDMA systems 0.7

0.6 RR, Timer = 1s

with HSDPA [1], [2], [3] and [4] are based on advanced 0.5
PF, Timer = 1s
MCI, Timer = 1s
QER, Timer = 1s
SA+QER, Timer = 1s
techniques such as fast physical layer retransmission, 0.4

0.3

adaptive modulation, fast link adaptation and efficient 0.2

0.1

scheduling techniques can achieve high throughput up 0

0 10 20 30 40 50
5
User throughput (10 bps)

to 10 Mbps [1], [3] and reduce the system delay [5].

However, these discussions did not elucidate the problem Fig. 1. CDF of the total received goodput with 5 schedulers, T1 =1s,
of packet stalling in receiving side reordering buffer. versus user throughput, Nu=30.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.

1
In Section III, we introduce different packet scheduling 0.9

CDF of overall received goodput in upper layer

algorithms (MCI, RR, PF, QER and the proposed Stall 0.8

0.7

Avoidance (SA) scheduler). Finally, in Section IV, we 0.6

0.5

conclude the paper by highlighting our contribution. 0.4

MCI, window = 16
0.3 QER, window = 16
RR, window = 16
0.2
III. C ONCLUSION 0.1
SA+QER, window = 16
PF, window = 16

0
We employed the fast packet scheduling based 6- 0 10 20 30
5
User throughput (10 bps)
40 50

channel SAW HARQ to achieve high-speed packet trans-

mission beyond 3 Mbps in a packet stalling environment
for HSDPA in the W-CDMA systems.
We have compared the performance of different sched-
ulers associated with timer T=1s is depicted in Fig.
1. of 3 km/h. The simulation results based window
=16 scheme show also the same effect Fig. 2: the
proposed scheme (SA+QER) based Timer and win-
dow mechanisms significantly improves the user aggre-
gated throughput for all the 30 accessing users. Finally,
we conclude with SA+QER based Timer and window
schemes, whole of accessing users within a cell can
obtain a user throughput up to 3 Mbps. Simulations
show that for different timers setting and window our
proposed scheme outperforms all the other schedulers.
Furthermore the overall system delay is also reduced.
R EFERENCES
[1] Li-Chun Wang and Ming-Chi Chen, ”Comparisons of Link-
adaptation-based Scheduling algorithms for the WCDMA Sys-
Fig. 2. CDF of the total received goodput with 5 schedulers,
window=16 versus user throughput, Nu=30.
tem with high-speed Downlink Packet Access,” Can. J. Elect.
Comput. Eng., vol. 29, no. 1/2, pp. 109-116, January/April 2004.
[2] Nobuhiko Miki, Akihito Morimoto, Sadayuki Abeta, and
Mamoru Sawahashi, ”Radio Link Performance of High-Speed
Packet Transmission in HSDPA”, IEEE PIMRC, pp. 1462-1466,
2002.
[3] Robert Bestak, ”Performance Analysis of MAC-hs Protocol”,
ICN 2005, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005, pp. 100-108,
March 2005.
[4] Arnab Das, Farooq Khan, Ashwin Sampath, and Hsuan-Jung Su,
”Performance of hybrid ARQ for high speed downlink packet
access in UMTS”, Proc. of IEEE VTC 2001-Fall, Atlantic City,
pp. 2133-2137, 2001.
[5] S. Abedi and S. Vadgama, ”A genetic approach for downlink
packet scheduling in HSDPA system”, IEEE WPMC ’2002, pp.
1-12, 2004.

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